CERAMICS 5. - Narrative project - 'Something The Boy Said'

As a theme for my narrative project I choose a song from Sting's album 'Ten Summoners Tales'. The album is very poetical and beautiful, and even though it is very dark and deep, I found it spiritual. 


The song "Something The Boy Said' says a story about a group of soldiers going to a war and a little boy - the captain's son - foretells them their bleak future. The soldiers suddenly realise that they are going to loose the battle and are not coming back... 'You will never see our faces again..."

As a first step I brainstormed together with my schoolmates some appropriate words that would relate to what I wanted to express:

I made few collages that dealt with symbols of destiny, fate, fortunetelling and symbolism of inevitable future:

While working on these I had a feeling that I am not going the right direction... I felt that the issues of whichcraft and tacky fortunetelling was not the point.

I also came across a small paragraph in a book dealing with symbolism of nature and freedom on one side and slavery and torture on the other. These was described through a beautiful story about a boy trying to save a wild wolf. I found the story very strong, but not fully relevant to where my narrative project was oriented. On the other side I found the symbolism of 'innocence' and 'experience' quite interesting.

The next collages express the feel of the song much better. I put together images that represent some of the words in the song and it works quite well:

Then I choose the main theme of the narrative project, which was going to be based on war conflicts and their consequences on humans. I put these symbols on one sheet:

From now on I proceeded with the actual projects.